The trip started out with a cold and rainy drive to Calgary on Tuesday evening. A quick sleep then off to the Airport at 6AM. Despite being there two hours early, the plane started boarding just as I made it to the gate – the line up for US customs was huge and took forever. On the positive side, going through customs and security went just fine. Airport security was very thorough, they swabbed my bags, and I got to have a full body scan (they gave me a choice, full body scan or a pat down – I’m a sucker for gadgets so I took the full body scan.
After that came the plane flight which was very quick – we took off on time and arrived 25 minutes early. Early! The flight was great, with just a bit of turbulence on take off and landing, but it was very cloudy so there wasn’t much to see during the flight.
After that, a quick ride on BART – the train that goes from the airport to downtown. Quite uneventful, but quite loud – no ipod listening happening on this train. I’ve used BART in the past and it’s a really nice, easy, cheap way to get from the airport to downtown.
Of course by then I was starving. In the past I’ve grabbed something to eat at the airport, but there are so many great things to eat in San Francisco that I decided to wait until I checked into my hotel to eat. A quick wander down to Fisherman’s Wharf and I found a great place to eat – Boudin, a bakery known for it’s sourdough. But not the big huge restraunt, the smaller one on the pier, that you can just walk right in to without having to wait. I had Chili in a sourdough bowl, but the real star of this meal was the very fresh, very tasty bottle of Anchor Steam (for only $3.50) that came with the meal. I’ve been looking forward to this beer for almost a year! Well worth the wait
The rest of the afternoon was spent just wandering around the downtown area. I checked out the City Lights book store, which was a very cool book store, unfortunately I think some of the books went waaay over my head. I have no idea what kind of books were in the “Typographies” category, and I’m still not sure what “commodity asthetics” means, but the city lights book store has a category for that.
Of course no trip to San Francisco is complete without a trip to the Apple store, and this trip was no exception. I did find out one thing – as much as you might want to, it’s just not possible to find the Appe store by ‘feel’. I had to result to using my GPS application, but I was getting really spotty GPS signals because of the tall buildings, so I ended up wandering around for an hour before finding the store. In the end it was worth it because I got to play with an iPad for a half an hour. As many people have said, there’’s something about the iPad that just can’t be conveyed without actually touching and playing with it. The iPad is a game changing thing of beauty, and it’s FAST. I managed to make it out of the store without buying an iPad, but that was mostly because they were all sold out! Word on the street is that they are getting a new shipment tomorrow, early afternoon.
I ended up having supper at the mall downtown. The food court there is a great place to eat. It’s not your typical food court, it is definitely higher end food. I had a great green chicken curry with jasmine fried rice. Go ahead and click on that picture – see the dishes? You get your food on a real plate, and you even get metal utensils! Little things amuse us small town people IO guess. The curry was excellent.
After supper I caught the cable car back to Fisherman’s wharf, and since it started to rain, I spent some time in the Barnes and Noble book store. Once the rain let up I was hungry again so I got a Double Double burger at In N Out burger (mmm). On the way back I did se the remnants of the famous San Francisco bushman, all though I didn’t see the man himself. Oh well, there’s always tomorrow.
If you enjoyed this post, check back tomorrow for more. Also you can see all my picutres on Flickr, and follow my travels minute to minute on my Twitter feed.
